The salted fish couple is fleeing famine

Chapter 316 Boiling Salt
After the meeting.

Several ship dealer representatives who had gained more than ten pounds were called in.

"What? Trading with the natives? Ah! Uncle, are you kidding?" The ship merchants thought they were hallucinating.

Aboriginal tribes, what are they worth trading for?
"I'm not kidding, the natives have seen gold, but the rules here are bartering, not using gold as currency." Uncle Zhongqin dropped the bomb on the ship merchants in an understatement.

"Gold? Do the natives have gold? Oh, uncle, why didn't you tell me earlier? We are willing!"

The ship merchants were in a panic: It seemed that the uncle and the general had known about it for a long time, and they only told them because they couldn't hide it.

Let’s just say, how could you stay here for so long just for these sweet potatoes and corn?

The food that has been going down has been harvested, but there is still no intention of setting off.

Love, there is actually gold here?

It seems like one billion has been missed!

I scolded these three people half to death in my heart, and all kinds of gratitude were expressed on their faces.

A successful businessman must be a qualified actor.

How could they endure such frustration alone?
The remaining ship dealers who were one step behind to get the news were hit hard.

They catch fish and eat meat every day, and all they see is the newly built cargo ships.

I never expected that these natives didn't know their stuff, and they didn't care about gold when they used stones to make weapons.

They have been here for so long and they don’t even bother to deal with these uncivilized people.

What a missed opportunity!

From tomorrow on, they will each exchange their own skills for gold, and no one can stop them from making a fortune!
If you want to go to a tribe farther away, you will definitely not be able to stay away from the locals.

Heiwa took his two sons to the jungle tribe in person.

They want to hire dozens of brothers from the jungle tribes to serve as guides and translators for them.

But as soon as they arrived at the jungle tribe, Chief Amu excitedly asked Amanlin to tell Heiwa:

"Our annual tribal gathering will begin when the sun sets thirty times! All the tribes in this land will come to participate!"

Hei Wa, who originally had to travel across mountains and rivers to find other tribes to trade with, was so sleepy that he encountered a pillow.

After asking about the trading format of this large gathering, as well as the items they usually trade.

He happily made an appointment with Chief Amu, and they were going to attend this year's big gathering with the jungle tribe.

Back at the base camp, when Uncle Zhongqin announced the good news, no one was unhappy.

The ship merchants hurriedly checked their remaining goods, thinking about which ones they should exchange with the natives in order to maximize profits.

The base camp was busy. Orders were placed again for the shipwrights, asking them to help weave large back bamboo rafts.

The back bamboo basket must be woven very finely, with gaps smaller than a human finger.

Make sure that everyone who goes to a large gathering has a back bamboo pole.

Shipwright: We are shipbuilders. We weave sieves and weave bamboo poles. This is the job of a bamboo craftsman, bamboo craftsman!
What are you trading with the natives?
The three giants discussed for half an hour and came to the conclusion: grain seeds, complete sets of clothes, and a lot of salt.

Gao Huaiyu marveled at Uncle Zhongqin's shrewdness, but it was basically a business without capital!
In his mind, goods grown or manufactured with a little effort are all worthless, and labor is worthless.

The food is of course their new harvest of corn, sweet potatoes and potatoes.

In Uncle Zhongqin's words, they can be considered a blessing to this barbaric land.

The grass seeds and plant roots of the indigenous people need to be replaced.

Where did the clothes come from?
The 30,000 naval brothers moved around with some slightly newer summer clothes without any difficulty.

Hei Wa secretly thought: No matter how good the silk is, can these people make it? Ready-made clothes work!
About their trump card: salt!

Heiwa got the news from his son and the others. Amanlin said that their salt was better than what his tribe could buy, only salty but not bitter. Children are very resistant to their use of salt to clean their teeth, thinking it is too wasteful!

Chief Amu also said that hundreds of tribes, large and small, live on their land.

Among so many tribes, there is only one that knows how to make salt - the Lake Salt Tribe.

Every year, at the annual great gathering.

Other tribes that do not have salt will use the most delicious prey and the most delicious plant roots in their tribes to exchange salt with the Lake Salt Tribe.

It takes nearly two months for their jungle tribe to prepare for this once-a-year trading opportunity.

It is also necessary to capture as many prey alive as possible and bring them to large gatherings, so as to ensure that the meat of the prey is the freshest.

It is not easy for them to obtain salt with a bitter taste, which shows how precious salt is to the indigenous people.

Now that this year's big gathering has allowed them to catch up, they can't let the Lake Salt Tribe be the only one to be beautiful!

Boiling salt directly with sea water is time-consuming and wasteful.

With Uncle Zhongqin as a later generation think tank, the naval forces are now able to cook salt much more easily.

A salt sand pit, a filter tank, and a large stove for cooking salt are all indispensable.

Every day at dawn, the sailors need to go to the deep sea and bring back a large amount of seawater.

Sprinkle evenly on a clean silt.

The scorching sun here will dry out this thin layer of sand at noon.

White salt crystals can be seen in the dried sand.

Then pour this dry salt sand into the salt sand pit, fill it full, and then spread it on the surface and compact it.

Finally, a layer of meadow was laid on the pit filled with salt and sand, and a large amount of seawater began to be poured into it, which filtered into the filter tank connected to the salt sand pit.

The filter tanks are connected one after another to filter the brine until the concentration of the salt brine reaches the standard for boiling salt.

There are no professional tools for measuring brine concentration, so you can only test it several times.

After struggling for three days, I found the best answer in the seventh filter tank.

The salt brine with the most appropriate salt concentration can be boiled in a large pot to easily obtain edible sea salt.

Ten large iron pots can cook more than 500 kilograms of salt in one day.

If they kept cooking until the day of the big gathering, they could cook out the salt of more than a hundred tribes for a year.

The considerate Uncle Zhongqin even fired a lot of big-eared black clay pots at the kiln on the river bank where sweet potatoes were grown, specifically to hold salt.

Such a big move was clearly visible to the ship dealers.

But, can they compete with the imperial court for business?

It’s not like I’m tired of living!
In addition to being busy instructing the pottery making and salt making, Uncle Zhongqin didn't want to let his brothers be idle at all, so he started to open up wasteland again!
He was reluctant to throw away even the vines whose sweet potatoes had been dug out. He cut off the thickest parts and continued to insert fibers.

In addition to sweet potatoes, potato and corn seeds that have not been used up on the ship continue to be planted.

Hundreds of acres of land would produce enough food for them to eat until they left.

The rest is definitely enough for them to take dozens of boats away.

Among vegetables, tomatoes have become everyone’s favorite.

They unanimously requested that we continue to plant them so that they can eat them as fruits.

The wasteland that had been planted before was now covered with a thick layer of manure and needed to be cultivated for a while.

(End of this chapter)